She is charged with committing a public nuisance by indecently exposing her penis to other members of the public, whilst masturbating from a property window.
French and Belgian women’s rights demonstrators are once again sounding alarm bells over the violence they are facing from trans activists while trying to campaign on women’s issues.
On November 28, a small group of about 12 female activists took part in a march against violence against women in Brussels, holding signs protesting the sex trade, including pornography. But the women’s efforts were quickly drowned out by a sea of trans activists, who they say surrounded them and pushed them into a corner.
The women report they were “beaten, insulted, intimidated” and had their signs stolen and torn up by a gang of over 50 trans activists who swarmed them despite their signs having nothing to do with them.
In footage a participant uploaded on Twitter, masked and hooded trans activists can be heard chanting “cassez vous,” (fuck off) at the women.
Similar events transpired at a violence-against-women demonstration in Barcelona on November 25.
These are not the only two occasions of women demonstrating against the sex trade being targets of trans activist anger. Earlier this year, women who gathered in Paris were pelted with eggs and assaulted with red spray paint in their eyes.
Later, the statue where the incident had taken place was spray painted with words translating to “save a trans person, kill a TERF.”
In Barcelona, during a March 3 Women’s Day demonstration, according to Women Are Human, a group of trans activists could “be seen suddenly kicking away and stomping on the women’s signs.” Then, the trans activists turned “their destruction into dance moves and set it to the beat of music and a rhythmically clapping crowd.”
Later on, an effigy of a woman was hanged on a tree in the same area.
Four women, all in their early to mid 20s, have banded together to offer online and in-person support for other victim-survivors of sexual assault.
The group has established a national online support group for survivors and allies and held real-life meet-ups in Sydney, with plans to extend interstate in the future. The Survivor Hub will be formally launched at an event hosted by Full Stop (formerly Rape & DV Services Australia) this week, as part of the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence.
The four women are emblematic of a generation that is changing the national conversation about sexual assault and consent. They are all in their early to mid-20s, making them contemporaries of other survivor-campaigners, including Contos, Saxon Mullins, Brittany Higgins and 2021 Australian of the Year Grace Tame.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, of the 1.4 million Australian adults who were sexually abused as children, only a small minority were first abused by a stranger.
Almost 85 per cent were abused by someone they knew, most often a close family member or even a parent.
According to Mr O’Connor, past efforts to warn children of the dangers of abuse — such as the Stranger Danger campaign of the 1990’s — have often left children with a false sense of who they should be wary of.
“We know that well over 50 per cent of all child sexual assault, including intrafamilial, the offenders would have backed off if the child would have shown some sort of distaste and dislike, fear, scare, anger.”
This comment can be difficult to hear, but if a child has never been taught they have a right to say no to an adult, no matter who that adult is, maybe they won’t.
Professor Middleton explained that the attachment dynamic — the need we have as children to be nurtured — is so strong that we make accommodation for mistreatment by dissociating it from our daily life.
Ukrainian fertility clinic, BioTexCom Center for Human Reproduction, received sharp criticism from netizens for an advertisement posted to Twitter featuring a woman surrounded by babies with the text: “SALE: Black Friday.” The clinic wrote: “Hurry up and receive a discount. A unique proposal for our clients – 3 percent OFF EVERY PACKAGE.”
In May 2020, photographs from the Kyiv-based surrogacy clinic made global headlines when over 100 babies were left stranded after Ukraine closed its borders to foreign travelers in order to prevent the spread of Covid-19.
The highly profitable surrogacy industry in Ukraine specifically targets poor women from small villages.
BioTexCom is also one of a few fertility clinics worldwide that is commercializing an untested and highly controversial method of genetic engineering that it markets as “mitochondrial donation.” This involves interfering with mitochondrial DNA of an egg to force an embryo to carry the genetic material of two women and one man, resulting in what is advertised as “three-parent” babies.
Tetiana Shulzhynska, a Ukrainian woman who underwent a surrogacy procedure in 2013 because she desperately needed to pay back a bank loan, attempts to warn other women. Shulzhynska contracted cervical cancer just months after giving birth. In 2020 she told The Guardian, “In a contract, they protect only babies, they don’t care about us.”
Moreover, Dutch researchers who analyzed the health records of more than a million children conceived through assisted reproduction involving frozen embryo transfer found they were more than twice as likely to develop childhood cancer. In addition, a study by the University of Cambridge found that children born via surrogacy are more likely to suffer from depression.
The critical analysis of pornography undertaken over decades largely by feminist academics and activists has produced a compelling account of how pornography serves to manipulate ordinary sexual interests and direct consumers towards more extreme content. The objectification of pornography performers and the promotion of the idea that they are consenting are both essential strategies to allow normal men (and, though less often, women) to feel comfortable with their pornography viewing. Drawing on interational academic literature from a range of disciplines, together with evidence from popular culture, contemporary news, and criminal law cases, this paper examines the growing body of evidence that pornography plays a pivotal and causal role in shaping real-world sexual behaviours and expectations. As the increasingly brutal fantasies represented in pornography continue to inform expectations for sexual experiences, the evidence for the detrimental consequences of this also proliferates.
In a precedent-setting case, a New South Wales judge has found self-proclaimed extreme body modification artist Brendan Leigh Russell guilty of female genital mutilation, grievous bodily harm, and manslaughter. Is consent a valid legal defence when cosmetic ‘body modification’ procedures go wrong?
Prostitution is laced with mortal peril: women who sell sex are 18 times more likely to be murdered than women who don’t, according to one study. Yet these women have throughout history been cast as second-class citizens, not worthy of the same concern as other victims.
How best to prevent violence against those selling sex, the vast majority of whom are women, is a question that has long divided feminists. For some, it is about decriminalising the selling and buying of sex, which in England and Wales would mean dropping criminal offences such as kerb crawling, soliciting and running a brothel. There will always be prostitution, so the argument goes, so best to keep it out in the open. Others agree that the selling of sex should be decriminalised in all circumstances and think women should be provided with ample support to get out of prostitution, but argue that the buying of sex, an almost exclusively male activity, should always be a crime.
The full decriminalisation argument is driven by a belief that it is possible to sufficiently strengthen the agency of those who sell sex to transform it into “sex work”, like any other job. . . . Women railing against this are depicted as prudes constrained by their own squeamishness about sex.
There are two reality checks that bring these theoretical arguments crashing down to earth. The first is that for every woman or man selling sex who regards it as a positive choice, and there are some, there are many more who have been trafficked or exploited and are effectively enslaved to criminal networks, working for a pittance, or for drugs to forget the trauma of being forced into selling yourself to be penetrated again and again, or for nothing at all.
Second, as the feminist campaigner Julie Bindel exposed in her 2017 book The Pimping of Prostitution, decriminalisation and regulation has not been the success its advocates claim.
Decriminalisation can’t make prostitution safe because it is inherently dangerous and exploitative. How is a woman selling sex supposed to maintain safe boundaries or withdraw consent when a man physically capable of killing her is hurting her?
To accept that prostitution is always going to happen, and therefore the best we can do is regulate it, not only means tolerating the abuse of women: it is to be complicit in its expansion.
CA — Princeton, British Columbia. A 73-year-old whose history of preying on women dates from 1966 to a murder committed 10 years ago while under court-ordered supervision for abduction, sexual violence and strangulation, recently came up for parole. Roger Dale Badour has been in prison since 2011, when he was arrested on an outstanding nationwide-warrant amidst Royal Canadian Mounted Police alerts to the public that a high-risk offender who posed a particular threat to women was on the loose. At the time the warrant was issued, Mr Badour was the subject of a long term supervision order due to previous sex crimes. His most recent conviction was for a 2008 incident in which he forcibly confined a pregnant woman and fellow Penticton rooming house boarder over a six-hour period, during which he sexually assaulted her with a weapon, strangled and threatened to kill her.
Although the parole board noted that Mr Badour had behavioral issues during incarceration, he was paroled to a halfway house in Victoria and given orders to abstain from friendships with women.
Defying the order, Mr Badour skipped town without notice. Again posing as a minister, he met 56-year-old Gisele Duckham, a grandmother of two described by friends as a generous and trusting woman. Mr Badour moved into a trailer on her Princeton property in 2011 in exchange for labor. He initially worked as a painter and then as security for a grow operation. One night, Mr Badour and Ms Duckham had an argument. He shot her twice and wrapped the body in material before fleeing in her car.
Mr Badour had previously served a seven-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to the November 1, 1999 sexually assaulting a 20-year-old woman in the back of his van on Munson Mountain.
While serving his latest prison stint for the murder of Ms Duckham, Mr Badour began identifying as a woman, and claimed his “new gender identification led to conflict and mistreatment” in his living unit. He was placed in a unit with other male inmates who identify as women.
Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling has vowed not to be silenced by trans activists, telling them: “I’ve received so many death threats I could paper the house.”
The 56-year-old spoke out after three exposed her home address by posting online a photo of them protesting outside.
She added: “They should have reflected on the fact that I’ve now received so many death threats I could paper the house with them, and I haven’t stopped speaking out.
“Perhaps – and I’m just throwing this out there – the best way to prove your movement isn’t a threat to women, is to stop stalking, harassing and threatening us.”
